Fading down the railway line
by irnan
Summary: She's never been one for rules and regulations, but maybe it's time to try something new.


_This is a disclaimer._

_**AN:** Yeah, I did it again. I swear, if it weren't for these challenges, I'd never finish ANY fics. Prompt this time was the following Chinese proverb: "If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time."_

**Fading down the railway line**

She'd heard someplace that there was a Chinese proverb about the essential things to decide on before you entered a game. Presumably it was meant to apply to gambling; and God knows her cousin would be furious if he thought she was treating this as some kind of game, which it certainly wasn't. She was the last person on Earth who needed telling that. Hello, withdrawal symptoms? Not Pretty.

But on the other hand… what was the hunt, if not a gamble?

And anyway, she'd been living rule-free for the past three years, since Mom and Dad had died, and look where that had got her, so it couldn't hurt to try something new.

Rule One: No alcohol, no smokes, no recreational drugs. No narcotics of any kind if it could be helped. Waking up in once in a hospital missing a whole weekend and without the slightest idea of how she'd got there or why was enough.

Rule Two: No money. Which, admittedly, was a rather unconventional rule even for a rehab as totally fucked as this one, but she was determined to stick to it. She wanted the freedom and independence money brought? She'd have to earn it first.

Rule Three: No fucking. Literally. As of now, she was celibate. As of now, she was living up to her… well no, it was too late for that, but the point was that she was done screwing nameless guys in bars who didn't object to breaking a few laws for a half-decent lay.

Rule Four: No emotional involvements of any kind with anyone outside her immediate family. They were messy, complicated, and got you… well… into exactly the situation she was in right now. Or worse, flat-out killed.

Worse, huh? Maybe she _was_ getting better.

What was next? Oh, the stakes.

Well, that was simple. Lives. Her life, her cousin's, the lives of the people they helped. No pressure there, not at all. Besides, she always did better when she had a goal, a purpose, a reason to do something. Most people did. She was the first to admit that she was terribly selfish, but when push came to shove, she came through.

Last but not least: the quitting time.

Well, she was seventeen now. She'd basically spent the last three years more or less systematically destroying herself. There was a very high chance she wouldn't survive her first month in this life, not considering how much of a mess she still was, even with her cousin's help. And even if she did, hunters didn't usually have much of a life expectancy. At a guess, she'd be dead before her fortieth birthday, and that was being generous.

At a guess, she'd be forgotten by then, too. But so what, anyhow? It wasn't that her life didn't mean anything to her. It was just that she held the unusual and not very widespread belief that not only was it better to die in battle than in bed, but she also had the right to chose that battle, and thus also the way she died, herself. There was still such a thing as a good death, an honourable way to die. True, she was no Sophie Scholl, and maybe the thing that killed her wouldn't be as powerful and dangerous as the Third Reich, but damn if she wouldn't choose her quitting time as if it were.

It didn't occur to her until she'd written all this down in her journal that they weren't thoughts a seventeen-year-old a year away from graduating high school oughta be having. She should be locked in a library somewhere, studying hard and dreaming of getting into Brown, same as her Dad had.

But Dad was dead, torn apart by a werewolf somewhere in the wilds of Oregon, and Mom with him, and this was the person their deaths had made of their precious delicate little girl.

It would be somehow nice, darkly poetic as it were, to be able to say she thought back to that day and those choices in the agonizing minutes before she died barely twelve years later, but to tell the perfect, utter truth, the question of whether or not she was about to die a good death was the furthest one from her mind just then. Dashing up the stairs with that damn nightdress John's stepmother had given her hampering her every step and a weight of panic in her chest so heavy she couldn't understand how she was still moving under it, the only things on Mary Winchester's mind were her sons.

Another twenty years later, walking across a kitchen that was no longer hers towards her beautiful broken grown up boys who were risking their lives to save a family they didn't even know with a poltergeist breathing down her neck and less than a minute to speak to them both before it was too late for all of them, the thought skittered across her mind that maybe, maybe this was the best of quitting times: when you were ahead.


End file.
